An understanding of network traffic behavior is essential in the evolution of today's wireless networks, and thus leads to a more efficient planning and management of the network's scarce bandwidth resources. Prior reservation of radio resources at the future locations of a user's mobile travel path can assist with optimizing the allocation of the network's limited resources. Such actions are intended to support the network with sustaining a desirable Quality-of-Service (QoS) level. To help ensure the availability of the network services to its users at anywhere and anytime, there is the need to predict when and where a user will demand any network usage. In this thesis, the mobility behavior of the wireless users are modeled as a Markov renewal process for predicting the likelihoods of the next-cell transition. The model also includes anticipating the duration between the transitions for an arbitrary user in a wireless network. The proposed prediction technique is further extended to compute the likelihoods of a user being in a particular state after $N$ transitions. This technique can also be applied for estimating the future spatial-temporal traffic load and activity at each location in a network's coverage area. The proposed prediction method is evaluated using some real traffic data to illustrate how it can lead to a significant improvement over some of the conventional methods. The work considers both the cases of mobile users with homogeneous applications (e.g. voice calls) and data connectivity with varying data loads being transferred between the different locations.

An understanding of network traffic behavior is essential in the evolution of today's wireless networks, and thus leads to a more efficient planning and management of the network's scarce bandwidth resources. Prior reservation of radio resources at the future locations of a user's mobile travel path can assist with optimizing the allocation of the network's limited resources. Such actions are intended to support the network with sustaining a desirable Quality-of-Service (QoS) level. To help ensure the availability of the network services to its users at anywhere and anytime, there is the need to predict when and where a user will demand any network usage. In this thesis, the mobility behavior of the wireless users are modeled as a Markov renewal process for predicting the likelihoods of the next-cell transition. The model also includes anticipating the duration between the transitions for an arbitrary user in a wireless network. The proposed prediction technique is further extended to compute the likelihoods of a user being in a particular state after $N$ transitions. This technique can also be applied for estimating the future spatial-temporal traffic load and activity at each location in a network's coverage area. The proposed prediction method is evaluated using some real traffic data to illustrate how it can lead to a significant improvement over some of the conventional methods. The work considers both the cases of mobile users with homogeneous applications (e.g. voice calls) and data connectivity with varying data loads being transferred between the different locations.

We have witnessed two main trends in recent years that have shaped the current state of communication networks. First, the Internet was designed with the initial idea to provide remote access to resources in the network; today it is overwhelmingly being used for content distribution. In addition, the community of content creators has evolved from a small group of professionals into a global community where every user can generate his contents and share it with other users. Second, the proliferation of personal mobile devices, such as smartphones and media tablets, has altered the way people access, create and share information, leading to a significant migration from wired to wireless networks and raising user expectations for ubiquitous connectivity. These trends have incited research on new communication modes and in this thesis we consider a specific mode, namely opportunistic networking. Opportunistic networking is a communication paradigm that utilizes intermittent connectivity between mobile devices to enable communication in infrastructure-less environments, and to provide complementary transport mechanisms in wireless networks where infrastructure is present. The thesis focuses on two main topics: understanding and modeling human mobility, and opportunistic content distribution. Mobility modeling is one of the key issues in opportunistic networking research. First, we discuss the structure of human mobility and introduce a framework to study mobility at different behavioural levels. We propose a queuing model, denoted by meeting-point model, for pedestrian mobility in smaller urban areas, such as city squares, parks, shops or at bus stops. The model is also a contribution to the second topic we address in the thesis, since we will use it to study characteristics of content distribution in smaller areas. We envision this model as a building block in a library of analytical models that would be used to study the performance of pedestrian content distribution in common scenarios of urban mobility. Furthermore, we show how the proposed model can be used to build larger, more complex models. In the area of opportunistic content distribution, we apply both analytical and simulation-based evaluation. We empirically study the performance of epidemic content distribution by using real-life mobility traces and investigate the fitness of a homogeneous stochastic model to capture the epidemic process. In addition, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile peer-to-peer system for opportunistic networking and discuss some promising application scenarios. / <p>QC 20131115</p>

Mobile communication devices may be used for spreading multimedia data without support of an infrastructure. Such a scheme, where the data is carried by people walking around and relayed from device to device by means of short range radio, could potentially form a public content distribution system that spans vast urban areas. The transport mechanism is the flow of people and it can be studied but not engineered. We study the efficiency of pedestrian content distribution by modeling the mobility of people moving around in a city, constrained by a given topology. The model is supplemented by simulation of similar or related scenarios for validation and extension. The results show that contents spread well with pedestrian speeds already at low arrival rates into a studied region. Our contributions are both the queuing analytic model that captures the flow of people and the results on the feasibility of pedestrian content distribution. / <p>QC 20130109</p>

In this manuscript we perform a rigorous mathematical investigation of the behavior opportunistic network models exhibit when two major real-world problems are taken into account. The first problem considered is obstruction. Here we model the network using an obstructed Gilbert graph which is a classical Gilbert graph but where there exist zones where no nodes are allowed to be placed. We take a look at percolation properties of this model, that is we investigate random graph configurations for which a component of infinite size has strictly positive probability to be created. The second problem considered in this thesis is mobility. Of course mobility in and of itself is not a problem but a feature in any network that follows the store-carry-forward paradigm. However it can be problematic to properly handle in a mathematical model. In the past this has been done by modelling movement by a series of static network configurations. However, with this technique it can be difficult to get a grasp on some of the time sensitive properties of the network. In this work we introduce the time bounded cylinder model which enables an analysis over a complete timeframe. We provide normal approximations for important properties of the model, like its covered volume and the number of isolated nodes. As we are using rigorous mathematics to tackle problems which computer scientists working in the field of distributed systems are faced with, we bring the two fields closer together.

This dissertation presents contributions to the fields of mobility modeling, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with mobile sinks, and opportunistic communication in theme parks. The two main directions of our contributions are human mobility models and strategies for the mobile sink positioning and communication in wireless networks. The first direction of the dissertation is related to human mobility modeling. Modeling the movement of human subjects is important to improve the performance of wireless networks with human participants and the validation of such networks through simulations. The movements in areas such as theme parks follow specific patterns that are not taken into consideration by the general purpose mobility models. We develop two types of mobility models of theme park visitors. The first model represents the typical movement of visitors as they are visiting various attractions and landmarks of the park. The second model represents the movement of the visitors as they aim to evacuate the park after a natural or man-made disaster. The second direction focuses on the movement patterns of mobile sinks and their communication in responding to various events and incidents within the theme park. When an event occurs, the system needs to determine which mobile sink will respond to the event and its trajectory. The overall objective is to optimize the event coverage by minimizing the time needed for the chosen mobile sink to reach the incident area. We extend this work by considering the positioning problem of mobile sinks and preservation of the connected topology. We propose a new variant of p-center problem for optimal placement and communication of the mobile sinks. We provide a solution to this problem through collaborative event coverage of the WSNs with mobile sinks. Finally, we develop a network model with opportunistic communication for tracking the evacuation of theme park visitors during disasters. This model involves people with smartphones that store and carry messages. The mobile sinks are responsible for communicating with the smartphones and reaching out to the regions of the emergent events.

Satellite systems have the advantage of global coverage and offer a solution for providing broadband access to end users. Local terrestrial networks and terminals can be connected to the rest of the world over Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks simply by installing small satellite interfaces. With these properties, satellite systems play a crucial role in the global Internet to support real-time and non-real-time applications. Routing in satellite networks, and the integration of satellite networks and the terrestrial Internet are the key issues to support these services. Furthermore, the developments in space technologies enable the realization of deep-space missions such as Mars exploration. The Interplanetary Internet is envisioned to provide communication services for scientific data delivery and navigation services for the explorer spacecrafts and orbiters of future deep-space missions. The unique characteristics posed by deep-space communications call for different research approaches from those in terrestrial networks. The objective of this research is to develop advanced architectures and efficient routing protocols for satellite and space networks to support applications with different traffic types and heterogeneous quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Specifically, a new QoS-based routing algorithm (QRA) is proposed as a connection-oriented routing scheme to support real-time multimedia applications in satellite networks. Next, the satellite grouping and routing protocol (SGRP) is presented as a unicast routing protocol in a two-layer satellite IP network architecture. The border gateway protocol - satellite version (BGP-S) is then proposed as a unified routing protocol to accomplish the integration of the terrestrial and satellite IP networks at the network layer. Finally, a new routing framework, called the space backbone routing (SBR), is introduced for routing through different autonomous regions in the Interplanetary Internet. SBR provides a self-contained and scalable solution to support different traffic types through the Interplanetary Internet.

Le degré de pénétration du marché des appareils intelligents tels que les smartphones et les tablettes avec les technologies de communication embarquées comme le WiFi, 3G et LTE a explosé en moins d'une décennie. En complément de cette tendance technologique, les appli- cations des réseaux sociaux ont virtuellement connecté une grande partie de la population, en génèrant une demande de trafic de données croissant vers et depuis l'infrastructure de com- munication. Les communications pervasive ont aussi acquis une importance dans l'industrie automobile. L'émergence d' une gamme impressionnante d' appareils intelligents dans les véhicules permettant services tels que assistance au conducteur, infotainment, suivi à dis- tance du vehicule, et connectivité àux réseaux sociaux même en déplacement. La demande exponentielle de connectivité a encore défié les fournisseurs de services de télécommunications pour répondre aux attentes des utilisateurs du réseau à grande vitesse. L'objectif de cette thèse est de modéliser et comprendre la mobilité dynamique des utilisateurs à grande vitesse et leurs effets sur les architectures de réseau sans fil. Compte tenu de l' importance du développement de notre étude sur une représentation réal- iste de la mobilité des véhicules, nous étudions tout d'abord les approches les plus populaires pour la génération de trafic routier synthétique et discutons les caractéristiques des ensem- bles de données accessibles au public qui decrivent des mobilités véhiculaires. En utilisant l'information des déplacements de la population dans une région métropolitaine, les données du réseau routier détaillées et des modèles réalistes de conduite microscopiques, nous pro- posons un jeux de données de mobilité véhiculaire original qui redéfinit l'état de l'art et qui replie la circulation routière de facon realiste dans le temps et dans l'espace. Nous étudions ensuite l'impact des dynamiques de mobilité du point de vue de la couverture cellulaire en présence d'un déploiement réel des stations de base. En outre, en examinant les effets de la mobilité des véhicules sur les réseaux autonomes, nous voyons des possibilités pour les futurs paradigmes de réseaux hétérogènes. Motivés par l'évolution dynamique dans le temps de la mobilité des véhicules observée dans notre jeux de données, nous proposons également une approche en ligne pour prédire les flux de trafic macroscopiques. Nous analysons les paramètres affectant la prédiction de la mobilité en milieu urbain. Nous dévoilons quand et où la gestion des ressources réseau est plus crucial pour accueillir le trafic généré par les utilisateurs à bord. Ces études dévoilent des multiples opportunités de gestion intelligente des transports, soit pour construire de nouvelles routes, soit pour l'installation de bornes de recharge électriques, ou pour la conception de systèmes de feux de circulation intelligents, contribuant ainsi à la planification urbaine.

Com base em três modelos de mobilidade MapBasedMovement, RandomWayPoint e RandomWalk presentes no simulador The One, sugerimos e discutimos vários modelos es- tocásticos para mobilidade. Primeiramente, a dinâmica das unidades móveis é reduzida a um processo chamado grafo dinâmico, de forma que a configuração espacial das unidades móveis em cada instante de tempo está resumida em um grafo. Os vértices desse grafo são unidades móveis e não mudam conforme o tempo: consideramos um sistema fechado, as unidades não desaparecem e não aparecem novas. O elo entre duas unidades (vértices) em um instante de tempo significa um contato neste instante (a distância entre as unidades é menor que um raio de contato), assim o conjunto de elos muda durante a evolução do sistema. Em seguida, modelamos a evolução do grafo dinâmico como um conjunto de pro- cessos aleatórios binários de forma que cada componente do processo está associada com um par de unidades móveis indicando presença ou ausência de contato entre elas. Três componentes principais constroem o processo: (i) distribuição de tempo de intercontato, (ii) distribuição de tempo de contato, e (iii) independência/interação entre as unidades. Nesta Tese mostramos teoricamente e através de simulações como escolher todos os três componentes para três modelos de mobilidade mencionados acima na situação de baixa densidade de unidades móveis, chamado DTNs (Delay Tolerant Networks). Considerar a modelagem da mobilidade desse ponto de vista é novo e não existe na literatura, até onde sabemos. Existe uma discussão na literatura sobre o tempo de intercontato, mas não conhecemos os resultados e discussão sobre a distribuição do tempo de contato e a interdependência de processos de contatos. / Based on three mobility models MapBasedMovement, RandomWayPoint and Ran- domWalk present on The One Simulator we suggest and discuss various stochastic mo- dels for mobility. First the dynamics of mobile units is reduced to process called dynamic graph, so that the spatial configuration of mobile units in every moment of time is sum- med up in a graph. The vertices of this graph are mobile units and do not change with the time: consider a closed system, the units dont disappear and not appear new. The link between two units (vertices) in an instant of time means a contact right now (dis- tance between the units is less that the radius contact). So the set of links changes during the system evolution. As a second step, the evolution of dynamic graph model as a set of random processes. Each process component is associated with a pair of mobile units indicating presence or absence of contact between them. Three major components build process: (i) distribution of intercontact time , (ii) distribution of contact time, and (iii) Independence interaction between units. In this work we show theoretically and by si- mulation how to choose all three components for three mobility models mentioned above on the situation of low density of mobile units, called DTNs (Delay Tolerant Networks). Consider the mobility modeling from that point of view is new and does not exist in the literature for our knowledge. There is a discussion in the literature about the intercontact time, but we dont know the results and discussion on the distribution of contact time and the interdependence of contact process.

Com base em três modelos de mobilidade MapBasedMovement, RandomWayPoint e RandomWalk presentes no simulador The One, sugerimos e discutimos vários modelos es- tocásticos para mobilidade. Primeiramente, a dinâmica das unidades móveis é reduzida a um processo chamado grafo dinâmico, de forma que a configuração espacial das unidades móveis em cada instante de tempo está resumida em um grafo. Os vértices desse grafo são unidades móveis e não mudam conforme o tempo: consideramos um sistema fechado, as unidades não desaparecem e não aparecem novas. O elo entre duas unidades (vértices) em um instante de tempo significa um contato neste instante (a distância entre as unidades é menor que um raio de contato), assim o conjunto de elos muda durante a evolução do sistema. Em seguida, modelamos a evolução do grafo dinâmico como um conjunto de pro- cessos aleatórios binários de forma que cada componente do processo está associada com um par de unidades móveis indicando presença ou ausência de contato entre elas. Três componentes principais constroem o processo: (i) distribuição de tempo de intercontato, (ii) distribuição de tempo de contato, e (iii) independência/interação entre as unidades. Nesta Tese mostramos teoricamente e através de simulações como escolher todos os três componentes para três modelos de mobilidade mencionados acima na situação de baixa densidade de unidades móveis, chamado DTNs (Delay Tolerant Networks). Considerar a modelagem da mobilidade desse ponto de vista é novo e não existe na literatura, até onde sabemos. Existe uma discussão na literatura sobre o tempo de intercontato, mas não conhecemos os resultados e discussão sobre a distribuição do tempo de contato e a interdependência de processos de contatos. / Based on three mobility models MapBasedMovement, RandomWayPoint and Ran- domWalk present on The One Simulator we suggest and discuss various stochastic mo- dels for mobility. First the dynamics of mobile units is reduced to process called dynamic graph, so that the spatial configuration of mobile units in every moment of time is sum- med up in a graph. The vertices of this graph are mobile units and do not change with the time: consider a closed system, the units dont disappear and not appear new. The link between two units (vertices) in an instant of time means a contact right now (dis- tance between the units is less that the radius contact). So the set of links changes during the system evolution. As a second step, the evolution of dynamic graph model as a set of random processes. Each process component is associated with a pair of mobile units indicating presence or absence of contact between them. Three major components build process: (i) distribution of intercontact time , (ii) distribution of contact time, and (iii) Independence interaction between units. In this work we show theoretically and by si- mulation how to choose all three components for three mobility models mentioned above on the situation of low density of mobile units, called DTNs (Delay Tolerant Networks). Consider the mobility modeling from that point of view is new and does not exist in the literature for our knowledge. There is a discussion in the literature about the intercontact time, but we dont know the results and discussion on the distribution of contact time and the interdependence of contact process.